Searching the Past to Understand the Future

Byzantine Logic

02/05/2013

I tend to put up some sort of State of the Blog post every year. I usually do it in January, I think. I also usually put up a bunch of grandiose plans that there’s no fucking way I’ll ever be able to actually carry out.

In truth, the blog isn’t really an important focus of mine. Nobody pays me to do it. Not that many people read it. I just do it because I like writing and I don’t have a lot of outlets for writing these days.

So I don’t have a big State of the Blog this year. I have five plans, such as they are:

1. I’m going to do the After Tamerlane stuff. Because it’s cool.

2. I’d like to get back to the Byzantine Logic stuff. I realized the other day that I haven’t done a proper Byzantine Logic post since before the move from Blogspot to Typepad, which is kind of crazy.

3. 1434 Fridays. At least, I’d like to do 1434 Fridays at least three times a month.

4. I’ve had an idea kicking around that I call “sketches.” Basically, I get some interesting character sketches knocking about from time to time. They’re usually short, single scenes of interaction between two or three characters. I usually don’t have any intention of doing anything with the scene itself in a larger scheme. I believe, though, that writing fiction is an act of empathy and sometimes a writer simply has to practice that empathy. Sometimes it’s in the form of characters who occupy a whole series of novels. Sometimes it’s in the form of characters who occupy a single page.

5. I never finished A Distant, Dreadful Star. This, I fear, is inexcusable. Part of the problem is that I started writing it right before I bought the house. Part of the problem is that I started writing it because I had a beginning but had no end. It’s now sat dormant for nearly a year as far as writing is concerned. It hasn’t been dormant in my mind, however, and I know exactly where the story has to go.

As such, feel free to read the first ten installments of A Distant, Dreadful Star. The long lost (no, really, I wrote it back in March of 2012) 11th installment shall go up tomorrow. For some reason I thought it would work better as the 12th installment and I needed to write another, more differenter installment first. Looking back, I don’t think that’s the case. With any sort of luck there will be a new installment every Wednesday until I finish.

Also, and I say this with a certain level of amazement, I’m really excited about this. I was re-reading some bits that I haven’t looked at since I originally wrote them and there were several things that caused me to think, “Holy shit, I can actually write.” I know that writers are supposed to hate everything that they wrote in the past because they’re never supposed to be satisfied. I’ll admit that A Distant, Dreadful Star is far from perfect. I’ll also admit that there are some parts that say exactly what I want them to say in exactly the way I want them to do it.

11/10/2010

I’ve been thinking lately about ground that I’ve trod over time and again on this blog. But, as with any well-trodden ground, I’m looking at it slightly differently. This is one of those things I love about ideas. They’re different every time you approach them because you are different every time you approach them. Some things you once held to be true have since turned false. Some things you’ve never considered are now paramount. Some things you didn’t know are now in your mental database. So that old idea takes on a new life.

Hopefully we all know what that means, even without having to get lost in the morass of links that is TVTropes. Some characters in movies, books, or TV shows figure out that they are in a movie, book, or TV show. They then figure out what kind they’re in and behave accordingly. This can be played for laughs or to create a Deus Ex Machina to get everyone out of thorny situations.

Part of the reason that the Genre Savvy character works is that we all like to imagine that we are, in fact, Genre Savvy. Sometimes we are. Sometimes we aren’t.

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Historians are a Genre Savvy lot. Well, those of us who actually study history and aren’t, y’know David Barton. We have a certain inbuilt advantage over those that we study: we know what happened. We know what came after. We know what our subjects didn’t know.

We (and by “we” I mean “everyone” and not the specific subset of “we” that is “historians) often look back at history, see a massive snafu, and ask, “How could they have possibly been so fucking stupid?” It’s simple. The people making decisions then didn’t know what we know now.

To wit:

In the early decades of the 13th Century a vast army appeared on the frontiers of Eastern Europe. Many of those kingdoms welcomed this army with open arms, only to find that they were now the subjects of what was probably the greatest Empire of all time. This was, undoubtedly, a shock, as that vast army was supposed to save them, not subjugate them.

How do we explain this discrepancy? It’s simple, really. The perception of what that army was did not match up to reality.

Since the second half of the 12th Century the European powers had been searching for Prester John, a great Christian ruler who dominated a vast area out somewhere in the Indies beyond the scope of the known world. It was said that he had an innumerable army that advanced under the sign of the cross.

The kings of Europe and the Pope desperately wanted to find this Prester John. The strength of Constantinople was faltering. The Muslim powers in the Holy Land were expanding in a terrifying wave across northern Africa, the Middle East, and in to the Mediterranean. The First Crusade (1096) had been successful, but the gains were modest and pressure against the Crusader kingdoms was high. The Second Crusade (1145) was a disaster and in the aftermath the great Muslim general Saladin rose and re-took Jerusalem and Acre. The Third Crusade (1189) was a stalemate. The Fourth Crusade (1202) was re-directed by the Doge of Venice and resulted in the Crusader army sacking Constantinople and setting up a puppet Venetian ruler, a move from which Byzantium would never recover to even the diminished status it held in the years before. The Fifth Crusade (1213), targeted at Egypt, was an abject failure.

The Europeans, in short, had shown that they were fractious, indecisive, and incapable of stopping the Muslim powers. Everything seemed hopeless. It was obvious that there would need to be some sort of external salvation. Fortunately, it seemed that exactly that salvation was at hand.

In 1165 a remarkably letter arrived at the court of Basileus Manuel I Comnenus of Constantinople. It purported to be a greeting from Prester John, a great king of a lost collection of Nestorian Christians. The letter spoke of the great wonders over which Prester John presided and the vastness of his armies. It was, it seemed, the final proof that was needed of the truth of the Prester John legends.

The letter spread all over Europe. The Pope and kings sent embassies in to the murky Orient to find the king and ask for his assistance. There would be another great Crusade, but this time the forces of Europe would be assisted by the invincible armies of Prester John and the world would be made right again.

In 1221 vast army did come marching out of the East. It drove the powerless Persians and Saracens before it, conquering vast swaths of land out beyond the Holy Land. Prester John, it seemed, had finally arrived. Europe breathed a sigh of relief and prepared for joyful victory.

But it was not Prester John who had arrived. It was Genghis Khan. And the Mongols were no lost sect of Nestorians, interested only in restoring Christianity to its rightful place over the Holy Land.

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Now, then, the interesting thing about this random-seeming bit of historical minutiae isn’t the case of mistaken identity. That happens all the time. The interesting thing is what happened next.

See, the powers-that-be in Europe tried to figure out what Genghis Khan had done to Prester John.

The story arose that the Mongols had somehow managed to defeat the undefeatable armies of Prester John. It seemed there was a Mongol tribal leader named Toghrul who may or may not have actually been real and was a Nestorian Christian. The story went that Genghis had married Toghrul’s daughter, then assassinated him and that Toghrul was Prester John.

The Popes (and I mean that, this went on for, like, decades), then, decided that their best course of action was to get Genghis to convert to Christianity and beat up the Saracens for them. This was, basically, the Prester John strategy, but even less closely connected to observable reality.

Genghis – and later Kublai Khan and probably a bunch of other Khans that currently slip my mind – played along with this. Christian emissaries were invited to debate Christianity and told that if they could prove their religion was the best, the Golden Horde would submit to the will of the Popes. I am reasonably certain that this was done for laughs.

But, regardless of motivation, the Mongols never actually did go for the whole Jesus thing. Some actually converted to Islam. But, mostly, they ended up being a real thorn in the side of Anatolian, Persian, and Middle Eastern Muslim kingdoms, anyway. There were, in fact, a few points before the rise of Osman and the Ottoman Turks that took his name where Constantinople could well have regained its power over the Anatolian heartland due to the weakening of the Turkish tribes and the Kingdom of Rum by Mongolian war bands. That is, they could have reasserted authority, assuming the Venetians hadn’t tricked the rest of Europe in to conquering the city in the Fourth Crusade and basically killed off all hope.

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So what does this have to do with being Genre Savvy?

Basically, we’re seeing it in American politics right now. The constant, imminent arrival of Revival is a huge thing in American Christianity. It’s Prester John for a modern Democracy. Every once in a while the Mongols show up. But we call them Ronald Reagan, George Bush, Newt Gingrich, John Boehner, Sarah Palin, and the Tea Party.

And this is a problem.

See, those of us on the rational side of the spectrum are looking for rational solutions to big problems. We’re saying, in effect, “Let’s not let the Venetians sack Constantinople. How about we get over that stupid Catholic/Orthodox divide and see how we can stand up to our mutual enemy?”[1]

The really religious types think they’re Genre Savvy. They think that they know how the story goes: things suck but a savior will arrive and fix everything. The ultimate end of that story, of course, is the one where Jesus comes back and makes everything right. But in the interim there have been a million Prester Johns.

And all those Prester Johns have turned out to be Mongols. Sarah Palin had no intention of fixing anything. She just got her name in the papers and used that to make a crapload of money and turn herself in to a kingmaker. The Tea Partiers that have made it to Washington are going to realize, “Hey, it’s kinda cushy here. We should stick around.” And they will. If history is any guide all we have to do is look back to 1994 when we had Newt Gingrich’s Contract with America and the collection of fresh-faced conservatives that rode in to Washington promising to fix the culture and leave, but never bothered to actually fix anything or leave. The main difference between 1994 and 2010 in terms of Republican rhetoric is that John Boehner was the one repeating the tired talking points this time around.

It’s old. It’s tired. It’s sad. And those of us who are actually somewhat Genre Savvy know the truth: we’re not in a fundamentalist horror story. We’re in a sitcom that just got renewed for its thousandth season in spite of the fact that the writers ran out of decent gags halfway through the first.

I, for one, am tired of it.

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[1]Um, for the purposes of this example, the “Muslims” are things like “failing infrastructure, massive unemployment, lack of a proper health care system, and huge disparity in wealth.” I now realize that this is a dangerous analogy, since I do not believe that the eventual Muslim takeover of the Levant, Anatolia, and Northern Africa was an inherently bad thing.

You can argue that an awful lot in the Muslim world today is extremely backwards and dangerous, but backwards is as backwards does and I highly doubt that it would be different if Jesus was involved on a high scale. Consider, for instance, the attempts to get Creationist curricula in to schools and the wholesale rejection of actual history we’re seeing from the fundamentalists. Consider, too, that movements like Quiverfull are basically cast from the same mold as the anti-woman dogma of the darkest, most backward parts of the Muslim world. There is a difference in degree, but that’s about it.

Consider, for a moment, the (highly apocryphal) story of the adulterous woman dragged before Jesus by a crowd that was all up and ready for a stoning. The story goes that Jesus was hanging out one day eating some Gummi Worms or something when a mob showed up, dragging a nekkid woman with them. They were all, “Hey, Jesus, we found this woman committing adultery and want to stone her. What do you say about that?”

The story then goes on to indicate that Jesus did not approve of the stoning. But it doesn’t really indicate that he disapproved of it, either. What he did, instead, was start writing in the dirt. Whatever it is that he wrote, though, has been lost to history. This dirt writing shamed the crowd and they all slunk away.[2]

So, after everyone’s gone, Jesus is all, “Where’d they go?”

And the woman was all, “Damned if I know.”

And Jesus was all, “Okay, then. Get outta here, you little scamp. But don’t let me catch you sinning again.”[3]

Now, at no point in the story do any of the major players think to, you know, stone the dude that said adulterous woman was adulterizing with. At no point in the story does Jesus say, “Hey, guys, can we think about this for just a minute?” And at no point can I recall hearing a sermon that involved this story that also involved questioning the gender-based assumptions that were made.

This is just the tip of the iceberg for places where women are treated as being different and less valid then men. The point is that Christians may not ritually stone women who have been raped like happens at places in the Muslim world. But there’s a halfway decent tradition of treating women like crap in Christianity, too. And I’d argue that things like Women’s Suffrage and feminism are a product of the Enlightenment, not Jesus and Paul being all gender-inclusive like the Christians would have you believe.

What’s the linchpin of that argument? There was a good 1500 years between the establishment of Christianity as the main Western religion and the Enlightenment. In all that time women weren’t exactly elevated to an equal status (except, to some extent, in Byzantium). It took the Enlightenment to even put those options on the table. Period. Full stop.

[2]This was either a terrible oversight or a sign of brilliant writing on the part of the author. Because we don’t know what he wrote in the dirt. He could have written out his times tables or a nice recipe for cherry pie. But, holy crap, it was effective.

And the thing about that is, really, what could Jesus have written in the dirt that caused a pissed off mob to slink away? I don’t know. And I’ll bet the dude who wrote the story didn’t, either. So he just opted for the old “show, don’t tell,” and figured he’d hand wave it off with the ol’, “Dude, it’s JESUS. What do you expect?” And that, right there, is good advice for all you would-be writers.

[3]For some reason the idea of the adulterous woman as an apple-cheeked youngster that old man Jesus just caught trying to steal cookies from his cookie jar amuses me. See, in this scenario old man Jesus lives in that one run-down house on the edge of town that no one ever goes to because there’s a really big fence and it’s kinda run-down and for some reason no matter what the weather or time of day any time you look over at old man Jesus’s place it’s dark and there’s only a sliver of a moon and a thunderstorm is about to roll in.

But all the adulterous woman’s friends have been calling her a chicken. They’ve been all, “You’re a big chicken, adulterous woman,” and she’s been all, “Am not,” and they’re all, “Are, too,” and she’s all, “Am not,” and they’re all, “Well if you’re not a chicken then you can prove it to us by going and knocking on old man Jesus’s door and asking him if he wants to buy a Christmas wreath,” which is a really odd plot point, since it’s only June and old man Jesus hasn’t died yet, so no one has bothered to steal the winter solstice and Mithrasday to turn in to Jesus’s birthday yet. But whatever. We’ll figure that out in post production.

But, anyway, the adulterous woman goes up to old man Jesus’s door and reaches for the doorbell. But she’s all scared and her knees are all wobbly and her teeth are chattering. But she steels herself by saying, “C’mon, now, adulterous woman, if you do this they’ll never threaten to stone you for being a chicken again.” And so she rings the doorbell and old man Jesus answers and he’s all mean looking and stuff and is wearing a plaid shirt and suspenders and has a gut that kinda sticks out over his belt, which seems kind of redundant now that you think about the whole belt-and-suspenders combo, and through her chattering teeth she says, “Would you like to buy a wreath to commemorate the birth of our Lord and Savior?”

And old man Jesus kinda bends over. And he kinda narrows his eye, you know, his one good eye, the one that’s open slightly more than the other one and that one has kind of a milky hue to it and it’s totally not a good idea to look directly at it because then you’ll start to stare and staring’s impolite and besides he probably has magic powers that are all centered in that eye and if you look at it too long he’ll turn you in to a salamander or something.[4] And old man Jesus opens his mouth to speak and it’s kinda gravelly because he hasn’t talked to anyone in, like, twenty years. And he says, “Would you like to come in for a cup of tea?”

And adulterous woman looks back at where her friends are hiding in the bushes and she kinda gulps and she says, “Y-yes. I would.” And they go in to the house and everything is kind of dusty and grimy. And old man Jesus tells her to sit down in a chair in the kitchen and pours two cups of tea and sits down across from her. And he stares at her for a while.

And then he says, “You know, I don’ t get too many visitors. There’s really no one to talk to.”

And then he starts to tell her stories. And they’re wonderful stories. About how he fought in the Great War and pitched for the Baltimore Orioles against the great Babe Ruth and marched for equality in Selma and when she leaves old man Jesus’s house again she realizes it’s been, like, four hours and her friends have all run home because they think he killed her and he asks if she’d like to come by for tea again tomorrow and the adulterous woman smiles and says she’d love to.

And then she walks home while old man Jesus smiles and waves from his front porch and the credits roll.

Also, that was pointless and really fun to write.

[4]Because, for some reason, old man Jesus is a combination of James Earl Jones in Field of Dreams and the witch in Big Fish and I stole most of this plot from the movie Sandlot.

I shouldn't have to tell you that it's piqued my interest. I mean, seriously. Every once in a while the question gets asked, "Is there some new or completely ignored world we can explore?" Prester John is way up on that list.

So, yeah, my interest is piqued. Wait, I said I shouldn't have to tell you that. Oops.